January tends to be a rough time for a lot of people – the holidays are over, the nights are long, and what remains of the days are cold, grey, and dreary. Morale is low, which is why so many of us set New Years resolutions that invariably fail; if it takes 30 days to set a habit and you start in a month where it’s a struggle just to get out of bed in the morning, how the hell do you expect to succeed? Knowing this, I try to plan for at least a couple of days off by myself at this time of year to reset my thinking. This year, I hit seniority at my job, which meant an extra week’s worth of vacation time that was immediately slotted for January.
I couldn’t have known it at the time, but the week I chose to take off work was perfect mainly because the week leading up to it was not. In the US, we’d had a Monday holiday as well, so a week’s worth of work needed to be crammed into four days instead of five. By Wednesday of that week I didn’t feel well, none of my technology would work, we learned the new IT tech we’d hired (and whom I’d been waiting for more than a month to start) was not going to show up ever, our water pump quit working and flooded my resource room, I learned not one but two of my colleagues passed away, and on and on. To ice the cake of awfulness, despite practically bathing myself in Static Guard (I am a pretty static-y person), when I got up from my chair to help someone my new skirt decided to work its way up to cling to the back of my sweater, exposing my favorite underwear for all to see. Did any of the students I was working with bother to mention this? No, no, of course not. It wasn’t until one of the professors came in with an embarrassed look on his face that I had an inkling something was out of the ordinary. I should probably mention also that our resource center is on the ground floor of a busy office building, next to the building’s main entrance, and the entire long wall facing said entrance is all windows. Fantastic.
That was the point where I locked myself in the server room and cried.
Thursday wasn’t much better, leading to a not-quite teary text to my friend Biomed asking “Do you think being an adult ever gets easier? Between yesterday and today, I know I can handle things as they come up and have dealt with worse, but why do I still feel like a kid? I just want to go home and build a blanket fort.”
So a week off was definitely needed.
I started by taking a drive to Pennsylvania, ostensibly to pick up a dishwasher from my sister (which actually would have worked if my car door could have opened an extra inch) but really just because I needed some alone time – no phone calls, no internet, no anything except me and my iPod for 400 miles of enforced solitude. I won’t lie, it was nice. I listened through my playlists for the past few years and latest Postmodern Jukebox album, and by the time I pulled back through the Cleveland city limits I had a much better perspective on life.
Sunday was Ghost in the Podcast day, where I decided to show the world what a devil I can be (I like dressing up).
Monday was prep and writing day.
Tuesday was a wash, but I needed the sleep.
Wednesday was bitterly cold, so it became a take-care-of-house-stuff day. After helping a ridiculous number of people with their resumes and LinkedIn profiles last week, I finally got around to working on my own for a bit before having a friend over for a good dinner and even better conversation. We then met up with my love and life partner at the comedy club, where the headliner, Jeff Allen, was surprisingly good for a Wednesday night show – he was hilarious and inspiring at the same time, which is not an easy thing to master. And of course, despite the cold I love walking through Cleveland’s 4th Street at night (although, as I told Matt on the way back to the car, I am always a little disappointed when I look up at the tops of the buildings silhouetted against the night sky without Batman standing up there, gazing into the moonlight).
Which brings us to today.
Since Northeast Ohio decided to rise above the freezing mark this morning, I took a long walk around the neighborhood to think about how best to handle two separate situations – one involving the love of my life, the other involving my sandbox team – that need to be delicately prodded out of their current stasis and into their respective futures. As I worked through each in turn, I found two four-leaf clovers sticking up out of the snow- one as I was thinking about the first dilemma, the second about fifteen minutes later as I was pondering the second. I’m still not entirely sure what my solutions will look like, but I’m taking the clovers as an indication that whatever they are, they should work (I put both in the magic notebook for added power).
Then, after I got home and booted up the laptop to work on story and LinkedIn stuff, I stopped to check my email and look into a problem one of the new writers was having. Doing so pushed me to look at some of the show forums, which while I’ve always had access I don’t really go into them often. Under ours, there was the standard run of horror movie polls and spider pictures (thanks, Olive), but one that I was drawn to was a message listener Gorione posted a month ago under the deceptively simple header of “Episode 84.” It read as follows:
“As I’m finishing up Episode 84 of GiP, a thought popped into my head. No Baron, we couldn’t tell you and the Baroness are married. 
True, you “fight” like a married couple, but to me it sounds like the good natured ribbing that occurs in a healthy, solid relationship.
“That and the 10 minutes or so where the Baroness was trying to make you sparkle with stripper glitter, where no horror was discussed, was hilarious. The interaction between you two is always something to look forward to and is quite entertaining. And the 10 second Twilight synopsis was spot on, good God I was laughing my ass off listening to that. I know a twitard that needs to hear that segment. 
“Keep up the good work, I’m loving the show, even though I’m not much of a horror fan, you guys make it interesting.”
Ok, so we’re doing something right. And it played into Dilemma 1, so Gorione’s comments were both touching and helpful. Chalk another one up in the “win” column for Thursday.
But what of Dilemma 2? Well, apparently LinkedIn has a blog section for business leaders to share personal stories. The recommended reading for me for today was an article posted last night by Jason Thibeault titled “Why It Took Me 20 Years to Write My Novel.” It was so pertinent to the problems I’d been mulling over that I immediately posted a link to the guys with the message “You all need to read this.”
The Universe is a strange and interesting place, and as our comedian pointed out last night, the signs to help you find the solutions to your questions are there if you know how to look. Sometimes they’ll come in books that fall off of shelves when no one else is around. Sometimes they’ll come in the lyrics of a song on the radio. Sometimes they’ll come in a conversation with a friend, or a comment by a comedian, or (in some extreme cases) a new billboard at the side of the road.
But my favorite ones have to be the clovers in the snow.
thefourthcastle.com 